This invention relates generally to autonomous agents and more specifically to autonomous agents for exploration of hazardous or inaccessible locations.
Robotic reconnaissance operations are called for in potentially hazardous and/or inaccessible situations such as remote planetary surfaces. One approach to reconnaissance operations is to use a few sophisticated, expensive, highly capable and reasoning surface-based reconnaissance craft (e.g., rovers). In this case the reconnaissance mission is lost or adversely affected when one of the few robotic reconnaissance craft is damaged or destroyed because there is no redundancy.
In addition, rovers are spatially constrained in that they may only view a small portion of an explored area at a time. For example, as most rovers are tracked or wheeled surface-based craft, their elevation above the ground provides only a limited viewing range. Therefore, it is difficult for a rover to view a large enough area to make an intelligent decision about what features in an operational area are worthy of additional investigation.
The spatial constraint of a rover also causes difficulties when planning a path for the rover to follow when traveling through the operational area. As such, the rover may construct a locally optimal path through an operational area but not a globally optimal path because the rover may not be able to view a large enough area.
As an intelligent rover is expensive, both from the perspective of the capital cost to build and the resource cost to deploy and operate, only a single rover is typically deployed within an operational area. This means that any operational area is constrained to an area no larger than what a single rover can explore.
Finally, because loss of a single rover during an exploration mission may be catastrophic from the perspective of accomplishing an exploration mission's goals, there has been a reluctance within the robotics community to allow a rover to be truly autonomous. True autonomy means that a rover would be able to make its own decisions about where to go within an exploration space. If the logic controlling the operations of the rover is faulty, and the rover makes a decision that causes it to become inoperable, the mission may be lost. As such, most currently deployed rovers are not truly autonomous as they are at least partially controlled by teleoperation by a human.
Therefore, a need exists for a robotic reconnaissance system that uses inexpensive surface-based craft that are inexpensive enough, both in terms of capital cost and operational resources, that multiple surface-based craft can be deployed during a mission. Multiple surface-based craft provide redundancy in the case a surface-based craft is lost. In addition, multiple surface-based craft may explore a larger area than a single rover. Finally, as loss of one or more of the multiple surface-based craft will not destroy a mission, the robotic reconnaissance system may be allowed more autonomy in making decisions about what paths to take while exploring an area. Aspects of the present invention meet such need.